Dozens of Families in Canaan Forcibly Evicted, More at Risk

On the morning of 7 December, a justice of peace (juge de paix) from the municipality of Croix-des-Bouquets accompanied by 17 police officers and a group of men armed with machetes and sticks forcibly evicted around 60 families from an informal settlement in Titanyen on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. The residents stated that the justice of the peace did not present an eviction order and that they had no prior notice of the eviction and therefore had no opportunity to appeal against it. The armed men began to tear down their dwellings without allowing the residents time to collect their belongings. These belongings were then stolen as police fired their weapons in the air in order to intimidate the residents. According to the residents over a dozen people were assaulted, including a woman who is four months pregnant. They were told that the remaining families living on the site (approximately 100) would also be forced off the land.

The aftermath of the eviction was caught on tape by documentary film-maker Jon Bougher. Bougher previously released a short film about the camp, its prior eviction from the Delmas neighborhood and the move to Canaan.

Amnesty describes the area where the residents were located:

Titanyen where they now live is part of an area commonly known as Canaan, a large tract of land which the then government declared for “public use” (utilité publique) two months after the earthquake in March 2010. Tens of thousands of people who lost their homes in the earthquake have subsequently relocated there, but many face eviction from people claiming ownership of the land.

The threat of forced evictions in Canaan is occurring at a time when residents on the land have lost their status as “official” internally displaced persons (IDPs). In October, the International Organization for Migration, at the request of the Government of Haiti, removed 54,000 individuals from their official IDP registration because it was deemed that the area showed “characteristics” of “new neighborhoods needing urban planning” and “not of IDP sites.”

As HRRW reported in October, the Haitian government had requested millions of dollars from the international community to build infrastructure and conduct urban planning, yet thus far the money has not materialized.

This latest eviction and other, prior evictions indicate that the residents of Canaan and the surrounding areas are very much still in need of the protections afforded to them as IDPs. According to the U.N.’s Refugee Agency, IDPs “legally remain under the protection of their own government,” however the presence of government officials and police during the eviction of Camp Mozayik highlight the urgent need for the international community to protect those who remain in tent camps and other informal settlements, nearly four years after the earthquake. Since the IOM no longer considers these families to be part of a displaced community, will the organization turn a blind eye to their violent eviction?